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Some positive news for fracking fans today, with three items that in a rational world would help convince some anti-fracking zealots that they ought to find something else to protest.

1. Ohio: Fracking Did Not Cause Earthquakes

Ohio regulators studying the cause of a rash of minor earthquakes near Cleveland late last year have concluded that fracking had nothing to do with it and that the tremors were very likely caused by the injection of wastewater into deep disposal wells. Ohio is now imposing new regulations governing the placement and operation of these deep disposal wells. Some or all of the wastewater injected down those Ohio wells came from drilling and fracking operations, but the action of fracking itself had nothing to do with the earthquakes. Such wastewater is generated by lots of industrial activities. The best section from the Ohio regulators' press release: "According to the U.S. EPA, more than 144,000 Class II disposal wells inject more than two billion gallons of brine every day in the United States. The U.S. EPA considers the deep injection of brine using Class II disposal wells as the preferred and environmentally safe method for disposal of oilfield fluid wastes. Prior to Class II disposal wells in Ohio, brine was stored in surface pits with harmful environmental results."

In a sign that the EPA doesn't have much faith in the science behind its study of groundwater contamination in a natural gas field in Pavilion, Wyoming, the agency announced on Friday that it would delay the creation of a panel to review its draft report until after the United States Geological Survey does its own independent test. According to the EPA's statement: "The EPA, the State of Wyoming, and the Tribes recognize that further sampling of the deep monitoring wells drilled for the Agency’s groundwater study is important to clarify questions about the initial monitoring results." The biggest question about the draft report was why did the agency think anyone would fall for their efforts to blame fracking for ground water pollution in an area known to have undrinkable water many decades before fracking was even invented. The gas reservoir at Pavilion (operated by Encana Corp.) is so close to the surface and topped by permeable enough rock that its extremely likely that the gas had naturally migrated up into the water table thousands of years ago.

Several instances of natural gas contaminating groundwater were caused by the construction of wells, not by the fracking process itself. That's according to an investigation conducted by Southwestern Energy and the Environmental Defense Fund. The findings, reported today by the Wall Street Journal, will come as no surprise to anyone involved in drilling shale gas wells. Yet they are likely to be dismissed by anti-frackers who continue to believe that cracks made in impermeable rock three miles below the surface can provide a pathway for minute amounts of chemicals designed to adhere to rock to somehow seep up and invade water reservoirs just hundreds of feet below the surface.